4
HERE HE IS, the pimply young male, anxious, excessive, bipolar by nature, busy running to and fro, zigzagging like in some video game between crevasses and gorges that open suddenly on either side and the narrowly averted obstacles of latent homosexuality, social ridicule, failure, or pure and simple capitulation in the face of women. All of these are minefields, territories where, if you once set foot, you can be blown straight into the air. His battles are not against the opposite sex, but rather against the fears engendered by his membership in his own sex. As a male, he has been set certain standards to attain and honor, and nothing can frighten him more than the doubt that his masculinity has turned out poorly, incomplete, wounded, whiny: as in point of fact it almost always is.
As a result, all the trouble he gets into, big and small, is precisely in order to make up for these terrors, to patch the holes with which his virility is riddled.
COMRADELY ATTRACTION, fear, competition, and especially sensitivity, that’s right, sensitivity, an insanely delicate sensitivity that no one would ever imagine in young men but that, instead, is in fact present, a highly acute and childish sensitivity toward the judgments and gazes of the other boys. An obsession bound together the classmates and at the same time offended them and drove them apart. They spent all their time measuring themselves against one another to see where they stood in the ranking of masculinity, and what score they would assign to the others. Females formed part of this competition only because they allowed males to gain higher rankings in the hierarchy of masculinity, and so males used them to judge one another, to settle their reckonings. They served as markers, indicators, like athletic achievements or musical tastes or the way they dressed. Anyone who thinks that it’s only girls who compare their clothing with other girls’ clothing is making a terrible mistake: males scrutinize one another with perhaps even greater attention to detail, and with an even more curious and relentless eye: nothing can drop your ranking like the wrong T-shirt, pair of shoes, or trousers.
When, from one day to the next, in your early adolescence, you convince yourself that you have discovered the difference between being male and being female, a competition begins, with the objective of distinguishing oneself, standing out. In order to prove that they have understood the role, like so many insecure actors, the boys overdo their performance, they load up on attitudes. Adolescents pose as men and women with an awkward and watchful seriousness, proportional to their fear of not being taken seriously, to the point of producing parodistic imitations of masculinity and femininity, caricatures, in other words, Guys and Dolls, a sort of Grease-style musical: boys cursing and girls squealing. For the males, the simplest way of proving that they are, in fact, male is to hold femininity in contempt: it is a clear negative precept, whose simplified formula tells us that in order to be men, it is sufficient not to be women. Even the fathers of bygone times (and maybe, to some small extent, those of today) worked in terms of a process of exclusion: rather than encouraging their sons to behave in a manly manner, they did everything they could to prevent them from behaving in a girlish one. A boy emerged from childhood with only one clear idea in mind, that is, to make sure he didn’t get dragged into sex. Any interest in anything that was even vaguely sexual was already considered in and of itself feminine. Any attention paid to one’s own body was taboo: looking at yourself in the mirror, combing your hair, paying attention to the way you dress. Any healthy young male ought to turn up his nose at all this, dress sloppily, wash infrequently, let his hair grow wherever it will, twisted and curly. The object that best sums up this foul-smelling slovenliness is the scarpa da ginnastica (that’s what gym shoes were called back then, now they have no name in Italian). This no-nonsense and slightly filthy model of masculinity has nothing new about it, indeed it dates back to many schools of philosophy of the ancient world; it finds its most extreme and polemical exposition in the writings of Julian the Apostate: this anachronistic emperor who, in the name of a thrifty and soldierly ideal, rejected the idea of shaving body hair, found baths enervating, and rejected the culture of massages and beauty care, in short, all the oriental faggotry that had softened Rome, muddling the roles of the sexes and making the imperial city no better than any of its client satrapies.
AT THAT AGE, the doubt of “not feeling like the others” becomes a certainty: no one can be or feel “like the others,” such a thing is impossible, everyone feels and actually is different, whether they think of themselves as very special or are afraid that they might be a scoundrel or a rogue or a monster.
And so there were two ways of expressing one’s anger against other males: either by subduing them with crude words and violent acts, proving in other words that you were more masculine than them, bigger and stronger than them, or else with a hysterical tantrum borrowed from the feminine repertory, that is, with an unnaturally piercing falsetto voice, scratching faces, shedding tears. Often the two styles, which share a common array of dirty words, are mixed . . . and there is no need to be effeminate for that to happen. The inexhaustible search for company, approval, similarity, and solidarity that males seek from other males, when it is frustrated, unleashes a resentment that may even be stronger than what can be felt toward the opposite sex: being rejected by one’s fellow male leads to a dramatic uncertainty concerning one’s own identity, even worse than the not entirely unexpected rejections that one receives from the opposite sex, which, however disagreeable, may even serve to strengthen that identity. A young man who rejects your friendship can hurt you more deeply than a young woman who rejects your love.
OFFICIALLY, if there is one thing that men seem to take pleasure in boasting about, it’s the fact that they are not women; but deep down, there is a widely circulating curiosity, an envy, and even a desire—or a frenzied lust—to be a woman, or at least to take the opposite gender for a test drive, so to speak, and to think with a woman’s head, to feel curving hips and bouncing breasts, your heart beating in a different way, and then to feel pleasure like a woman, to cry the way women cry, and if the experiment were to last over a longer period of time, then, yes, miraculously become pregnant, and give birth like a woman . . . all things that are off-limits to men, things that appeal to men every bit as much as they frighten them.
SO WHAT DOES IT MEAN to be male? How, and by virtue of what, are men recognized as males? Since most men by and large fail to match the commonly accepted image of a male, and don’t possess at all the presumed identity of the real man, a male amounts to being other than the way one actually is—it means being the way one ought to be. A male isn’t someone who is male, but someone who has to be male, and it is in this absolute requirement that we find its essence. A male, then, is a non-being or rather a being-for, a potential being, a volition, an edge concept, a guiding principle.
Effort, demonstration, proof of self. You aren’t born a man, you become a man. There is no such expression as “Be a woman!” equivalent to the well-known “Be a man!” (See, for example, the terrifying Kipling poem “If,” the worst and most banal thing that great narrator ever wrote, and there are even people who hang it on the wall and force you to learn it by heart . . .)
THE COST OF LIVING up to expectations, to fit the role that you imagined a boy, a man, a male was supposed to play. Just what was that role? What price did we pay?
I personally paid that price. In this book I have told and will go on to tell about various episodes, of how and where and how much I paid, in short, the payments of my debt of maleness. Of how I never managed to pay off that debt. Of how unfair and yet inevitable it was that that repayment would be demanded, from me and from all my schoolmates and all the males who have looked, or are now looking, and may someday look over the threshold (should I say over the brink of the cliff?) of adolescence. I’m not talking about women here: they have their own substantial debts to pay, and each of them owes a share. There is surely a female deity to whom these tributes are donated, perhaps something like the Artemis of Ephesus, or some big-bo
somed pre-Columbian, or Kali, or else a cherub.
NOW LET’S NOT OVERSTATE THIS solidarity among males. A man is certainly different from a woman, but truth be told, he’s also different from all other men. And in fact he might prove to be much more different from most men than he is from certain individual women. While the difference from women is taken for granted from the very first day, from the pink or blue ribbons hanging outside the door of the hospital room in the maternity ward (a horrible custom, which I hope is falling into disuse, that marks from the very beginning the unbridgeable sexual gap: even before the name, or the skin, or the family, or the social rank, before anything else, it is in that catalogue that you come into the world, “a fine bouncing baby boy has been born . . .”), the differences among men become clear along the path, and for the most part they come as a disagreeable surprise, and in some cases might prove to be far more acute and strident. When you realize that those who ought to be like you aren’t at all . . . then it comes naturally to say, I’m not a bit like them . . . I’m not at all like them, even though I, too, have a thingy dangling between my thighs. This apparent similarity does nothing other than widen the disparity. So there are two types of diversity, which are too often mixed up: one is interspecific, the other intraspecific. It’s like the differences among peoples: there can be no doubt that the Italians are different from the Germans, but there is less average diversity between an Italian and a German than there might be between certain Italians at the farthest extremes from one another. Groups, genders, social categories, and peoples have abyssal internal differences.
WE USE as yardsticks the ability to keep uncertainty under control, to eliminate it or suffocate it, or at least not to allow oneself to be overwhelmed by it. Uncertainty is in its turn engendered by one’s personal inability to respond adequately to situations of danger, novelty, or mere contact with other people. For some (and I am one), it is an immense challenge to be in the same room as ten other people: I get the impression that they’re all looking at me, judging me, want to threaten me or seduce me or be seduced by me, or else that they’re intentionally ignoring me; while the truth is that none of them gives a damn about me, about who I am or what I do. The uncertainty comes from the feeling of being threatened, and at the same time, the desire for emotional intimacy.
ANY YOUNG MALE wishes to be further masculinized. The masculinity that he possesses, nine times out of time, is inadequate, hesitant, uncertain, and so it needs to be remodeled and buttressed. If it tends toward the feminine, then it needs to be straightened and redirected. If, on the other hand, it is too accentuated, then brakes need to be put on it. Strength is not the only indicator of masculinity, in fact an even greater indicator is the ability to get that strength under control (more or less the same thing that the ads for a well-known brand of tires say, or what soccer coaches preach when they recruit a talented but reckless young player).
THE CHALLENGES that masculinity had to overcome when I was born, at the time of my boyhood and youth, were no longer considered universally valid, and they were already subject to disapproval and ridicule by the time I became a man, that is, when it was my turn to overcome them. From John Wayne and Steve McQueen we’d passed on to Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino: instead of manly men and men’s men, the model had shifted to short, neurotic men.
THE TRUE OPPOSITE of masculinity wasn’t femininity but homosexuality: a perilous border. The masculine ideal could be defined as a negation: the exact opposite of a man wasn’t a woman, it was a queer.
The most intolerable fear for us males was that someone might laugh at us . . .
Do you know what it means to fight all the time, all the time, against fear and shame? I’m talking about the fear of being made fun of, of being considered a faggot.
If by chance you were considered a faggot, to fight back, you had to immediately find another kid who might act a little effeminate, or weak, or shy and fearful. Carry out a police operation along the border between the sexes. A sort of night watch.
FROM WHEN I WAS EVEN SMALLER . . . at the park . . . I remember dramatic and deeply stirring games that were dubbed with such familiar nicknames as “hide and seek” and “tag,” names that tell you nothing about the immense frustration, indeed, the despair of those who were found or taken prisoner, because they weren’t fast enough or clever enough, the true victims of those cruel games, who had to count on the speed and spirit of sacrifice of some other friend willing to liberate them.
I remember that little girls were a source of contamination, they always wanted to kiss you, they’d chase after you with their lips pursed and pouty. I remember the hatred I felt toward fat girls and girls with glasses, and the instantaneous love toward the pretty ones.
But even the pretty ones were destined to suffer abuse. They were invited to play, for instance to jump rope, and for a while the game proceeded normally, the boys would turn the rope at the right rhythm for the girls to jump . . . then the boys who were turning the rope would speed up the pace or reverse direction and the girl would wind up tripping and falling, and everyone would run away, variously laughing or shrieking. The girls were so used to being interrupted or tricked in the course of their play, or having their toys stolen or destroyed, that they’d developed rituals to make up for the mistreatment the males had inflicted upon them: if the guilty parties hadn’t already run away of their own volition, they’d dismiss them, waving them away with a sigh of resignation that was already fully adult, resuming their game, consoling the girls who were crying. They’d pretend that nothing at all had happened. “Ah, those dopes . . .” was the comment, and if they were sometimes angry at the treatment, at the same time they might also be amused at the stupid pranks that were played on them.
to penetrate the space of others
the space of girls
to violate their space, their conversations
to violate their body
LITTLE BOYS might not know what sex is, but they know perfectly well what domination is, and therefore they tend to interpret sex as domination and defeat (“Papà is hurting Mamma, and in fact, listen to her scream . . .”). Some boys maintain this identification, even when they’re adults.
PLAYING AT SOMETHING is the first step on the path that leads to seriously doing something, a sort of dress rehearsal. The performance of aggression toward young girls was innocuous only because and only as long as it remained a performance, but its content remained valid once the game was over, as something that could always be put into practice when the time was right. Doing things as a joke is the most effective way to learn how to do them for real. Playful terrorism.
THEY CONTAMINATED MALES with their touch, their kisses, their saliva, their feelings . . . or just with their presence!
TO HAVE THE FEELING one needs to overcome a wall of resistance. Even when there isn’t one. To have to win out at all costs, after some lighthearted skirmishing, then turned serious, determined, angry, or desperate.
AND THEN, once you’ve grown up, also the sensation that you need to get the better of a woman to fuck her. It would seem to be a reasonably well-founded idea, psychologically speaking, but at the same time, in factual terms, it’s not true in the slightest, at least for me and, I believe, for all the men of my generation. If I think back to the women I’ve gone to bed with in my life, well, let’s say a third of them did, in fact, make me work for it, at least a little. Some of them a lot, some just according to standard ritual, I wouldn’t know. The ones who made me work too hard, I just gave up on, but I have no evidence of whether or not I did the right thing. Maybe if I’d insisted, who can say . . . Of the other women, a good half of them (meaning a further third of the total number) had the same thing in mind as I did, and we found ourselves in each other’s arms with admirable promptitude.
The other third simply lunged right at me.
PUSH AWAY, push away, push away. In our destiny as young male animals, this too was written: that males separate, and females unite. Starting right fr
om the matter of how his or her body is built, or ought to be built, the male defines, distinguishes, identifies; the female accommodates, shares, mingles. She aspires to union, we aspired to separation . . .
IN MY DAY and in my social class the typical young woman was: fragile, vague, docile. Fair-haired but not actually blond. Silent but not really sad, other people could make her laugh, now and then. You can make her laugh, even if you’re not the most charismatic guy around, still, you seem to be enough for her. The first great explorer of the human mind maintained that apathetic young women are particularly desirable on the matrimonial market. A man can take her as she is, empty, and fill her with the contents that best suit him, whether real or imagined. That was true in his day, but also in my day.
Fragile, docile, apathetic, vague:
toward this lovely woman it’s almost
a chivalrous obligation to appear as protective
as indulgent . . .
OUR PARENTS, whether enlightened conservatives or cautious liberals, wound up bending to the new aspects of the period, unwillingly but still they gave in—sexual freedom, foul language, sloppy dress, political extremism, provided there was no action to suit the fiery words, informality of all kinds—with that form of annoyed or worried indulgence that sociologists call “grinding acceptance,” which to my Italian ear sounds like acceptance with clenched teeth. The new ways filtered into our family like a fine dust, while in other families they had already pervaded every aspect of life, and in others still, they simply hadn’t penetrated, at least theoretically, because of the staunch, die-hard resistance put up by the parents of our classmates to change of any kind. We were the eldest children, the firstborn, already sapped and weakened by the new effeminate culture, based on desire instead of personal sacrifice and hard work. There were those who chose to react with spectacularly symbolic and violent actions, in the belief that bombs and rapes were essential to the restoration of a society ordered according to manly principles, a society that could once again be called masculine. Paradoxically, it turns out that many of these were the most spoiled children of all, anything but spartan!
The Catholic School Page 18
